The astonishing and consistent attacks on the Attorney General by the Informer newspaper and to some extent the Daily Post leaves a sour taste in the mouth of many people. If people who profess to be professionals behave the way these newspapers are behaving then the journalistic profession needs a lot of refinement.
The motivation or justification for these attacks cannot be the incompetence of the Attorney General or her alleged relationship with the opposition NPP. Whatever it is, their acts are tainted with so much vindictiveness, enmity and deliberate ignorance that they are no longer making sense.
These two good for nothing newspapers accuse the Attorney General of not prosecuting NPP officials who have been alleged to be corrupt meanwhile nobody has submitted a docket to the Attorney General which she has failed to prosecute. As far as I know she has rather gone out of her way to constitute teams that have been tasked to investigate the allegations we all know about. In his ignorance the editor of the Informer seems to believe that the AG is the one with the responsibility of investigating issues of corruption. Some free compulsory basic education is needed here and I will freely supply it. We have the Serious Fraud Office, the Bureau of National Investigations, the National Security, the Auditor General’s Department and the Police Service who have functions of exposing corrupt practices in public office. Has this foolish editor of the Informer been to the IGP to ask how many cases have been submitted to the AG for prosecution? None of these institutions have submitted any credible docket to the AG which she has disregarded.
I have always raised the issue of who is in charge of fulfilling NDC’s campaign promise of prosecuting past NPP officials. Though the task is twofold (investigative and prosecution) many have sought to blame the AG for doing nothing on this front. However the missing link I believe has been the Investigative agencies and sloppy reportage by certain media houses like the useless Informer. There is much talk about the Isofoton and Zakhem issues. The question is who has arrested or even questioned those related to these transactions. Is it the Attorney General who is expected to invite these people for questioning?
The issue as I have said is the lack of enthusiasm on the part of some institutions with investigative powers. The Police, the BNI should be able to tell NDC supporters and all Ghanaians interested in seeing that justice is done what their efforts on all these fronts have been. The Attorney General needs more support from these investigative agencies if the NDC is to prosecute many of the cases we know of.
The crusade the Informer is waging is a very unholy and insincere one. They are actuated by malice and being influenced by some in the NDC who believe that the post of the Attorney General is their birth right and that they must by all means be appointed to the post. Why is it that it is only the Informer newspaper that has seen the so called incompetence of the Attorney General and not the opposition in parliament who vetted and approved her appointment as the Attorney General or any of the other media houses in Ghana?
The sad effect of this egotistical and inordinate propaganda against the AG is that the NDC is fighting against itself instead of concentrating on the job at hand and making nonsense of anything the opposition might say against the policies and programs of the NDC.
All these nonsense from the Informer and the Post have gone on even though the AG has since last year been prosecuting past members of the NPP Government. What has been lacking is constant media coverage to inform the general populace on proceedings in court. Asamoah Boateng is being prosecuted so is Osei Adjei who was a former foreign Minister and the killers of Issa Molbilla. If the Informer and the Post were able to publish stories on Ghana@50 for 4 months and make money out of the revelations that came out, it should know that it is the AG that set the Commission up for the Vice President to inaugurate. How many times have this empty Informer and the Daily Post gone to sit in the Court room to report on these cases.
Nobody gives dates for court hearings of these cases to papers like the Daily Guide but they are always reporting these matters. Instead of being diligent in their work and informing the public about the NDC’s efforts in prosecuting past officials who engaged in criminal behaviour these newspapers whose readership extend only as far as their paymasters are rather castigating and throwing stones.
I took the trouble to go onto the site of radio gold which has in the past proven to be the mouth piece of the NDC. What I discovered stunned me! The website though running has not been updated in some months. Craig Murray’s story and Daily Guide’s story that Jerry Rawlings has separated from the wife are still current news on the page. With this attitude do you blame the AG if people to not know about cases being prosecuted and most of the policies and programmes the NDC is pursuing?
I believe that we must stop this unintelligent and brainless way of politicking and recognise each other’s valuable role in ensuring that the NDC is retained in power come 2012. Zita has been roundly criticised for being incompetent but it was her vigilance that exposed Asamoah Boateng’s corruption at the Information Ministry.